Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978)

Emmanuelle (1974) having been a gigantic hit by the late 70s everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon. One of the most successful attempts to do so was the Italian Black Emanuelle series. The awesome thing about all these Emanuelle rip-offs (which changed one letter in the heroine’s name to avoid legal problems) is that they had virtually no connection whatsoever with the original movie or the original character, other than the fact that they were skin flicks filmed in exotic settings.

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade, directed by Joe D’Amato, was the seventh of the Black Emanuelle films. The Black Emanuelle movies made a star out of Indonesian actress Laura Gemser.

In the Black Emanuelle movies Emanuelle, rather than being a French diplomat’s wife, is an investigative photo-journalist. In Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade she’s in Nairobi, trying to get an interview with an Italian gangster named Giorgio Rivetti (Venantino Venantini). Emanuelle has her friend Susan (Ely Galleani) helping her out. Susan likes sex. She likes sex a lot. Her car breaks down a lot but that doesn’t worry her because she knows a really good mechanic. He might not know much about servicing cars but he knows how to service Susan.

Rivetti has some business deal cooking with Prince Arausani (Pierre Marfurt). He’s having trouble getting the prince to close the deal. In exchange for an interview Emanuele agrees to do what she can to persuade the prince to see things Rivetti’s ways. Emanuele is very good at persuading men.

This part of the film is mostly an excuse for some bedroom romps. We also see Emanuele taking a shower with Susan, which provides some of the girl-on-girl action which was obligatory in 70s softcore movies.

Then the real plot of the movie kicks in. Emanuele saw something in Nairobi Airport which intrigued her - a man boarding a plane with a girl in a wheelchair. Shortly afterwards she sees the man and the girl again, but there’s no wheelchair in sight. Emanuele is after all a journlist and she has a good nose for a story. She definitely smells a story here. After doing a bit of digging around she realises she’s stumbled onto a white slavery racket. It’s run by an American businessman, Francis Harley (Gabriele Tinti).

Being an ace girl reporter Emanuele decides to go undercover, posing as an ambitious girl down on her luck who is willing to consider prostitution as a career option.

Emanuele manages to infiltrate a high-class brothel in San Diego. What she really wants to do is to find out what happens in the Annexe - the girls are forbidden to go there so there must be something really shocking going on. Unfortunately Emanuelle gets caught and she’s in danger of being lobotomised.

There are a lot of problems with this movie. The first half hour has no connection whatsoever with the rest of the film. The pacing is slow. The suspenseful parts aren’t very suspenseful. But mostly what’s wrong is that it promises shocking subject matter but it doesn’t deliver. It just isn’t shocking at all. So there’s a high-class prostitution ring. Apparently we’re supposed to be horrified that such things go on. There’s a bit of nastiness but it has no edge to it and makes no impact. We never feel that Emanuele is in real danger.

The impression this movie gives is that no-one involved was all that interested. There’s a noticeable lack of energy. Romano Scandariato should have been told to toss his screenplay out the window and start again.

There’s an astounding amount of female frontal nudity and there are lots of sex scenes. What’s surprising is that the movie doesn’t feel the least bit sleazy. It’s too laid-back. The bits that are supposed to be sleazy fall flat. We feel vaguely that we should be horrified when Emanuele gets raped but the scene lacks impact and five minutes later Emanuele seems to have forgotten all about it.

And when all is said and done the villains don’t seem very villainous. You can’t help feeling that if nosy reporters like Emanuele would stop hassling them they’d just run their fancy brothel without doing any great harm to anybody.

The girls in the brothel seem to be very well paid and rather cheerful. We’re supposed to believe that they’re slaves but they just don’t act like it. They just don’t give the impression that they feel brutalised or exploited. They giggle and gossip a lot. The Italian gangster, Rivetti, seems like a really nice guy. Francis Harley, the chief villain, comes across as a pretty nice guy. Even Madame Claude, who runs the brothel, seems rather pleasant. She’s a lesbian but she’s not a wicked predatory lesbian. She just likes girls.

The Full Moon DVD offers only the English dubbed version and the dubbing is atrocious. That’s obviously not Full Moon’s fault and the transfer is pretty good. This movie was also included in the DVD set from Severin, Black Emanuele’s Box vol 2.

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade just seems too lighthearted. It delivers plenty of skin but that’s about it. Not worth bothering with unless you’re a Laura Gemser completist.

I reviewed the first movie in this series, Black Emanuelle, years ago. It's also not great. And aeons ago I reviewed Emmanuelle, which really is worth seeing.